Download free computerized mp3 audio file of this column
(To subscribe to my columns at no cost, click here.)
The title of this column is a quote from 25-year retired Army Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Aguilar. Colonel Aguilar’s missions took him to Iraq, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Jordan, and the Philippines. He received the Purple Heart for wounds he received in combat. After retiring from the Army, he served as a security contractor in Gaza for UG Solutions, which was contracted to provide security at aid distribution sites operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. He resigned from his position after approximately two months, citing human rights violations and crimes against humanity being committed by the security agency at the behest of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
What Colonel Aguilar witnessed in Gaza by the Israeli military (and the U.S. private contractors under the direction of the IDF) is further evidence of just how vile and wicked the Israel government and its military really are.
Colonel Aguilar was recently interviewed on the AJ+ podcast. Here are excerpts from that interview:
Anthony Aguilar: Never in my life did I think that an army could be so evil as to use food to lure a starving population through a battlefield, killing women and children and the elderly on purpose.
Dena Takruri: I wanted to hear more about how he went from believing he was going to Gaza to help feed Palestinians to realizing the United States was complicit in Israel's genocide, particularly as a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Army.
So, what did you understand to be the mandate of your mission? What exactly were you going to be doing on the ground there?
Aguilar: What we were told in kind of a general overview briefing before we got on the plane out of Dulles is that the United States stepped forward to take over the United Nations mission because Israel would no longer allow the United Nations in and that Israel will allow the United States to work with them to do it and that we were going in to take over that mission to deliver food.
I envisioned that we would be going in, occupying and securing, or securing at least, 400 distribution sites and securing 500 to 550 trucks a day going in because that's what the UN did. That was my mindset going in. And I believed that until the very first day I got there, and I realized that that was not the case.
Takruri: Describe to me what you first saw and felt when you arrived to the Gaza Strip.
Aguilar: What I witnessed in that first look as we came in was the most devastating, destructive, beyond war annihilation, apocalyptic thing I'd ever seen in my life. Something that I couldn't even imagine in a nightmare. Rubble, dogs eating remains of bodies, smoke in the horizon from bombs being dropped, not a building left in sight and everything leveled. It was a landscape of destruction and horror, which I've never witnessed before. And honestly, it made me feel sick.
The Israel Defense Forces were leading us, and they gave us this briefing. They pulled out a giant map that showed operations that were going on. First of all, I didn't see 400 distribution sites; I saw 4. All of them were in the south, away from the areas that people needed the food. And no one north of the Netzarim Corridor from Gaza could reach these sites. That started to paint a picture to me that this is either horribly planned or there's something else going on here.
Then when I looked at the sites and I saw the operational graphics on their map—this is an Israeli map that showed that offensive combat operations going on around these sites—these sites were behind the forward line of contact, the front line, if you will, which means the civilians have to cross, have to travel through the fighting to get there. It's a violation of the Geneva Convention.
Takruri: Why do you think it was designed that way?
Aguilar: It became clear to me that it was designed that way when we got to site one, and I walked up to the berm to stand up on top of the berm to look, and there's Merkava battle tanks driving through and firing at positions. There's a battle going on. There's mortar rounds, there's artillery rounds. There's people, thousands of Palestinians lined up along the coastal corridor, the coastal road, because they have nowhere else to go; they live on the beach. They live there in shanty tarp shacks because there's nowhere else to live because their homes have been destroyed. And there's this battle going on.
And I look at my map, and I look at that, and I go back, and I talk to the IDF and to the guy in charge, the GHF guy in charge. And I said, “We can't distribute aid from these sites. We're going to get a lot of people killed, and it violates Geneva Conventions. We cannot do this.” That was wholly ignored [by the IDF commander]: “We're going to do it anyway. We're doing it. It doesn't matter. We're fighting Hamas. The Geneva Convention doesn't apply.”
But then when I saw all the sites, how all the sites were designed this way, it became very clear to me then from seeing the way the sites were designed and how they functioned, that this is forced displacement. The Israeli government, through the Israel defense forces in Gaza, are using food to bait Palestinians to forcefully displace them to the south en masse. And I don't mean just a couple hundred. I mean, everybody, the entire population.
Takruri: Did it strike you as wrong that the same people that were deliberately starving Palestinians, the Israelis, are now tasked with feeding them?
Aguilar: Morally, ethically, legally, humanitarianly: wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, it was shockingly wrong to me, which is why in the beginning I thought, “Do these people just not know what they're doing? Or this can't be intentional.” But what came to my realization, and it came to me very hard, is that this is intentional.
Takruri: Why did you initially think it's not intentional?
Aguilar: Because I didn't think anybody could be that evil. [Emphasis added]
Takruri: So, in your interactions with personnel from the IDF, how did they describe what they were doing? Or how did they talk about the Palestinians that they were purportedly feeding?
Aguilar: The Israelis did not want to feed the Palestinians. From the very bottom level, IDF soldiers in Gaza that I talked to that are in Gaza, in the war, they asked me flat out one day, clearly, “Why are you feeding our enemy?” I was like, “Well, we're feeding the civilians.” “No, they're all our enemy. You are feeding our enemy.” I was like, “Women, children, old men and women?” “Yeah, they're all the enemy. Every Palestinian is our enemy.” That's how they saw it.
But they also referred to them as animals. They called them zombies. They referred to the groups of the Palestinians where they'd come to the sites as “the zombie horde,” dehumanizing them, not providing them water, shooting at them to get them to move a certain way like they're animals in a cage. It's horrible.
Takruri: And was this perspective of dehumanization also evident in the GHF members that you were working with as well, your colleagues?
Aguilar: Absolutely. The American contractor who's in charge of the entire security plan for armed Americans being in Gaza is the national president of the Infidels Motorcycle Club, a US-based veterans motorcycle club. The charter of their organization is to fight jihad and the elimination of all Muslims from the earth. This is the guy in charge of the armed security for delivering food into Gaza to a predominantly Arab Muslim population.
Takruri: Other than these sort of ideological motivations for going to Gaza, were contractors with GHF well compensated?
Aguilar: Well, this type of work is very lucrative. So, for all of us and what we were getting paid: $1,320 a day. So, if you're there making that much money…and that was just the run-of-the-mill person. If you're in a leadership position, site leader, mobile leader, you're making $1,600 a day.
[For that much money] you can just look the other way, say, “This isn't my problem. No one's going to know.”
These guys are going to go there, and they're going to get rich, and they're going to come home with $300,000 after four or five months of work. Can you imagine only having to work five months out of the year and being rich doing it? It's a lot of money.
Not to mention the people that run the contract, they're making millions. Millions. This future Gaza Riviera resort plan is going to make people billions.
This is about money, which is really the sickening, sickening part of this. This isn't about Hamas. This isn't about religion. This isn't about who owns the land. This is about money. And it's disgusting.
Takruri: I did want to ask you, what is your reaction to the leaked Trump Gaza Riviera plan, which calls for the reconstruction of Gaza as an investment and manufacturing hub? And Boston Consulting Group, which also worked on the plan for deploying GHF, is involved. Do you think GHF should be involved in this plan to turn Gaza into a U.S. territory?
Aguilar: So, in the main control center, where the operations are, on the wall in that main control center, is a large poster of a Boston Consulting Group rendering of the future industrial complex resort. That rendering is on the wall in the control center at Kerem Shalom for the GHF. The GHF is not a humanitarian organization. And they don't care. They are there to stake property.
Takruri: At what point did you decide that you could no longer have any part to do with it?
Aguilar: On the 8th of June, I was in the control center and outside of Kerem Shalom, and we were distributing at site number two. And I'm in the control room watching it on the screen. The crowd was very, very packed in there, very packed. And people were being crushed up against concrete walls inside of the sites that were lined with barbed wire, this razor wire, and people were getting crushed up against it.
So, there was a Palestinian man in the crowd who lifted these children up because they were getting trampled and crushed; they were small. And the Israel Defense Force liaison officer, a senior ranking officer in the Israel Defense Force who is in our operations center, looks at the screen, and he says, “Get them off of there right now.” And so, I'm looking at the same thing he's looking at. I'm like, “Well, the security on the ground there, they're addressing it. They're dealing with it. But I mean, these are children. Calm down. These are children.”
“Get them off of there. That's not secure. Get them off,” the IDF officer said.
I was like, “They're children. They have no shoes on. They don't have any weapons. There's nothing in their hands at all. One of the children doesn’t even have a shirt. Calm down.”
He walks back to his desk, gets on the radio with his forces, and then he comes back over to where I'm standing, and there was an American in our operations center that understood and could speak Hebrew a little bit. And he says to me, “He just said on the radio for his snipers to shoot them down.”
So, when this officer came back, I asked, “Did you just order your snipers at site number two to shoot these kids?” He said, “Well, if you're not going to take care of it, I will.” And I said, “We're not shooting children.”
As we were having this dialogue, the children had run off to the edge of this wall, and they jumped down so they could run away. They were scared. They didn't want to be there. Thank God we didn't have to see what would have come.
But in that moment, the Safe Reach Solutions contract lead, the boss if you will, who was in the operations center, called me over and he said, “Tony, never say no to the client.” And I said, “What do you mean don't say no to the client?” He said, “The IDF are our client. We work for them. They're in charge.” And I was like, “Even when they say to kill children?” He said, “What decisions they make and how they want to fight this war, who they decide to kill or not is not our decision. This is a contract. This is business. Don't say no to our client.”
Takruri: And did you step down at that point?
Aguilar: I told him at that point, I said, “I’m done.”
Takruri: How many people do you understand to have been killed at these GHF sites up until now?
Aguilar: From the beginning of operations, 26 May, until today, thousands. Not only the hundreds and hundreds into the magnitude of thousands that have been reported by the U.N. and Médecins Sans Frontières and others at the Nasser Hospital and the Khan Younis hospitals directly near these sites receiving about MCI, or mass casualty incidents, on the days that correlate to the same times and dates of distribution. But there are hundreds of bodies buried outside of these sites that have just been buried in the rubble, bulldozed and buried in the ground.
Takruri: So, what do you want Americans to know as one of the few Americans who has been to Gaza during this genocide?
Aguilar: The United States is hand in glove with the Israeli government in committing a genocide. What is happening in Gaza is not a misfortune of war. It is designed: the displacement, the removal, the destruction, the ethnic cleansing, the genocide. It is by design.
Wake up, America. If we stand by and we allow it to happen there, it's going to happen here.
Folks, there you have it: a first-hand eyewitness account of not only the brutality and sheer wanton genocidal murder of the Palestinian people by the Israelis but also the direct, on-the-ground complicity of U.S. private contractors. Of course, this is in addition to the billions of dollars of U.S. technology, surveillance systems, military equipment, intelligence, naval battle groups, bombs, missiles, jets and other munitions, along with direct CIA support and assistance.
We’re talking about billions of dollars from the U.S. government, billions of dollars from high-tech companies in the United States and hundreds of millions of dollars from the private billionaire class all designed to annihilate millions of innocent people from their homeland so the billionaire class (mostly Zionists) can create a Riviera on the Mediterranean—a Las Vegas on the Sea—from which the Jared Kushners, Steve Witkoffs, Miriam Adelsons and Donald Trumps of the world can rake in billions more in blood money into their corrupt coffers.
In my message last Sunday entitled No “Christian” Can Continue To Support The State Of Israel, I said the following:
The last two years have exposed the Israeli state for who and what it really is.
The entire world sees the total depravity of behavior, the utter lack of moral consciousness, the astonishing degree of racial supremacy on public display in Israel.
Two years of ethnic cleansing; two years of mass murder; two years of mass starvation; two years of genocide; two years of lies and deceit; two years of political manipulation; two years of Israeli domination of the presidents and legislatures of the United States and Western Europe; two years of an out-of-control, rogue Israeli state are now crystal clear.
Now, we learn of just how depraved and degenerated the Israeli mind really is: And it shocks the senses!
Journalist Max Blumenthal (who is himself Jewish) has reported the details of this latest Israeli atrocity. I’m paraphrasing Max:
An Israeli Army unit repeatedly raped a Palestinian civilian man—a man who had no connection to Hamas—in an Israeli prison in the Negev desert. The soldiers recorded the serial rape of this man on camera.
A female Israeli general, the army’s legal attaché, was unable to prosecute the rapists because there were national pro-rape riots across Israel consisting of army reservists who besieged Israeli army bases and staged a rebellion, breaking into army bases demanding the rapists had done nothing wrong.
And the military leadership let these guys go free.
One of them, the key rapist, actually went on national TV and appeared on talk shows as a kind of national folk hero and a victim.
She [the legal attaché] was so frustrated that she leaked the video.
Israel and the U.S. media and politicians in both parties accused Hamas of sexually abusing Israelis on October 7th. And not one of those allegations has been validated by any forensic evidence at all. No evidence!
But here we have the sick psychopaths in the Israeli army literally filming themselves serially raping this innocent Palestinian man, and Netanyahu’s only concern about the event is that the incident is bad public relations for Israel.
The lady general who released the video to the public has been arrested and will go to prison, while the rapists are free to live their lives with ZERO accountability or retribution.
Blumenthal: This scandal should illustrate just how deeply depraved and sick Israel is and how corrupt its political system is.
It’s illustrative of the entire Zionist worldview, where for two years we’ve watched them commit genocide, carry out a holocaust of children across the Gaza Strip, deliberately starve people, and now they’re playing the victim because people are rejecting their political worldview, rejecting Israel.
And in this case, we have footage, documented footage, indisputable, that no one denies, not Netanyahu, not even these soldiers, of the rape of an innocent Palestinian male prisoner who was kidnapped from the Gaza Strip.
OK. ENOUGH!
Enough: “The Israelis are God’s chosen people” claptrap.
Enough: “We must bless Israel to receive God’s blessing” gobbledygook.
Enough: “Zionist Israel is the fulfillment of Bible prophecy” hogwash.
ENOUGH! ENOUGH! ENOUGH! ENOUGH!
Evangelicals who are still determined to support the satanic State of Israel are NOT “Christians.”
By that, I mean they are not resembling the character and person of Christ; they are not following the teachings of Christ. In attitudes, words and actions, they cannot be called “followers of Christ.”
And here’s the stark reality: People all over the world do not see these evangelicals as Christians. They see these evangelical Zionists as phonies and puppets, which is exactly what they are.
Add Blumenthal’s report to the eyewitness testimony of Colonel Aguilar, and the only people who do not see the sheer evil emanating from inside Tel Aviv, Israel and Washington, D.C., USA, are people who don’t WANT to see.
Hear again what Colonel Aguilar said: “Wake up, America. If we stand by and we allow it to happen there, it's going to happen here.”
A man without moral conscience and human empathy (Donald Trump)—who doesn’t blink an eye at murdering people in Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, who doesn’t blink an eye at murdering people in the waters of the Caribbean Sea—won’t blink an eye at murdering U.S. citizens on the streets of America.
P.S. This is the second notice that the giant compilation of America’s greatest founding documents that we call THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS is available for pre-order.
The publishing date is Thursday, November 20. Once the books are printed, they sell out quickly. And the first orders we ship are to those who have pre-ordered.
After November 20, orders are filled on a first-come, first-served basis. And, again, our supply always sells out quickly.
Pre-order THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS here.
© Chuck Baldwin
*If you appreciate this column and want to help me distribute these editorial opinions to an ever-growing audience, donations may be made by credit card, check, or Money Order. Use this link:
Chuck Baldwin Live Donate Form
I also have many books and DVDs available for purchase online. Go here:
Chuck Baldwin Live Store
To subscribe to my weekly columns, click here:
Subscribe to Chuck's Column
Related
|